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Dick Higgins
Richard Carter "Dick" Higgins (March 15, 1938 - October 25, 1998) was an American poet, composer, printer, and early Fluxus artist.Dick Higgins, de.Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. Web, Sep. 21, 2014. Life Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire. Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied composition with John Cage at The New School in New York. He married fellow artist Alison Knowles in 1960. Both took part in the Wiesbaden, Germany Fluxus festival in 1962. Higgins founded Something Else Press in 1963, which published many important texts including Gertrude Stein, Marshall McLuhan, artists John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenburg, Ray Johnson, Bern Porter, leading Fluxus members George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Ken Friedman, and others. His daughter, Hannah Higgins is the author of Fluxus Experience, an authoritative volume about the Fluxus movement. Her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, a New York based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung, late Fluxus gallerist Emily Harvey and The Artists Museum's and Construction In Process, performed and collaborated as a youth in original Fluxus related events. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s. He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid 1960s, when Alison Knowles and he created the first computer-generated literary texts. The Book of Love & War & Death, a book-length aleatory poem published by him in 1972, included an example. In his introduction, Higgins says, having finished the 1st 3 parts of the poem throwing dice, he wrote a FORTRAN IV program to produce part or Canto 4. All in all Higgins wrote and edited 47 books, including On the Composition of Signs and Images, his edition of a Giordano Bruno text, which he annotated. He saw Bruno's essay on the art of memory also as an early text on multi- or intermedia. A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a theory of the new arts collected many of his essays and theoretical works in 1976. In 1972 Higgins founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Printed Editions) to publish his short novel Amigo. Higgins died of a heart attack while attending an event in Quebec, Canada. Publications Poetry *''A Book about Love & War & Death: Canto One. New York: Great Bear, 1965; San Francisco: Nova Broadcast Press, 1969; Barton, VT: Something Else Press, 1972; UbuClassics, 2004. (.PDF) *''For Eugene in Germany. Barton, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1973. *''Modular Poems''. Barton, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1974. *''Everyone Has Sher Favorite (his or hers): (models from 7 of the 70's). New York: Unpublished Editions, 1977. *''Some Recent Snowflakes, and other things. New York: Printed Editions, 1979. Plays *''The Ladder to the Moon, 1959-1965''. Barton, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1973. *''City with All the Angles: A radio play'' (photos by Bern Porter). West Glover, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1974. *''Classic Plays''. New York: Unpublished Editions, 1976. Fiction *''Legends & Fishnets''. Barton, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1976. *''Of Celebration of Morning: A polysemiotic fiction''. New York: Printed Editions, 1980. Non-fiction *''Pop Arkitectur / Concept art'' (with Wolf Vostell). Dusseldorf, Germany: Droste, 1969. *''Fantastic Architecture'' (with Wolf Vostell). New York: Something Else Press, 1969. *''George Herbert's Pattern Poems: In their tradition''. West Glover, VT: Unpublished Editions, 1977. *''Dick Higgins Bio/bibliography''. New York: Higgins, 1978. *''A Dialectic of Centuries: Notes towards a theory of the new arts''. New York: Printed Editions, 1978. *''The Word and Beyond: Four literary cosmoligists'' (with Richard Morris, Donald Phelps, & Harry Smith). New York: Smith, 1972.The Word and Beyond: Four Literary Cosmologists, Waterstone Marketplace. Web, Sep. 21, 2014. *''Horizons: The poetics and theory of the intermedia''. Carbondale, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984. *''Pattern Poetry: Guide to an unknown literature''. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987. *(Contributor) Talking the Boundless Book: Art, language, and the book arts: Essays from 'Art & language: Re-reading the boundless book' (symposium) (edited by Charles Alexander). Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1995. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Dick Higgins, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Sep. 21, 2014. See also *List of U.S. poets *Concrete poetry *Language poets References External links ;Prose *"A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry" * [http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lhiggins.htm Higgins's Metadramas] ;Audio / video * Dick Higgins, Danger Music Number Seventeen at Ubuweb * Intermedia Tribute to Dick Higgins ;Books *Dick Higgins at Amazon.com * ;About *Dick Higgins, 60, innovator in the 1960's avant-garde obituary at the New York Times * Dick Higgins, 1938-1998 at Umbrella * Dick Higgins at UbuWeb * Ruud Janssen interview with Dick Higgins about mail art *multimedia vs intermedia at if:book ;Etc. * Dick Higgins collection, 1958-2002 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County * Dick Higgins Collection, 1968-1993 (MsC 790) at the University of Iowa * Dick Higgins papers, 1960-1994 The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. Papers collected or generated by Higgins, documenting his involvement with Fluxus and Happenings art movements, pattern and concrete poetry; new music, and small press publishing from 1972 to 1994, with some letters dated as early as 1960. * Fluxus Performance Workbook Category:1938 births Category:1998 deaths Category:People from Cambridge Category:Fluxus Category:American people of English descent Category:English poets Category:Language poets Category:Media theorists Category:American poets Category:20th-century poets Category:Poets